In traditional synthetic and medicinal chemistry, chemists typically synthesize, work-up, purify, and analyze compounds one at a time. However, with the more recent onset of small molecule combinatorial chemical synthesis which provide large chemical libraries, this one-at-a-time method has obvious limitations in requiring large numbers of chemists and equipment leading to high costs and slow turnover. As an alternative, the combinatorial chemist may provide a non-purified reaction product to the client. Of course, this option merely shifts the burden to the client to subsequently carry out whatever purification may be necessary for its purposes, using the same one-at-a-time methods.
With the advent of very large combinatorial chemical libraries, and the need for chemical products in purer form than the raw reaction products produced by liquid phase (solution) synthesis of combinatorial libraries, there exists a need for a method to purify the reaction products, and to identify specific sought-after chemical compounds which are components of the raw reaction products. Moreover, there is a need to separate the identified chemical compound components, each of which may have a different biological activity, so that they may be used separately by a client. There is also a need to relate these identified compounds back to their raw reaction product source, which provides data on how to readily prepare more of each identified compound.